Posts Tagged 'Optimization'

Research from the Aberdeen Group shows the average website is losing 9% of its business because the speed of the site frustrates visitors into leaving. 9% of your traffic might be leaving your site because they feel like it's too slow. That thought is staggering, and any site owner would be foolish not to fix the problem. SPEEDILICIOUS — one of our new Catalyst partners — has an innovative solution that optimizes website performance and helps businesses deliver content to their end users faster.

I recently had the chance to chat with SPEEDILICIOUS founders Seymour Segnit and Chip Krauskopf, and Seymour rephrased that "9%" statistic in a pretty alarming way: "Losing 9% of your business is the equivalent of simply allowing your website to go offline, down, dark, dead, 404 for over a MONTH each year!" There is ample data to back this up from high-profile sites like Amazon, Microsoft and Walmart.com, but intuitively, you know it already ... A slow site (even a slightly slow site) is annoying.

The challenge many website owners have when it comes to their loading speeds is that problems might not be noticeable from their own workstations. Thanks to caching and the Internet connections most of us have, when we visit our own sites, we don't have any trouble accessing our content quickly. Unfortunately, many of our customers don't share that experience when they visit our sites on mobile, hotel, airports and (worst of all) conference connections. The most common approach to speeding up load times is to throw bigger servers or a CDN (content delivery network) at the problem, but while those improvements make a difference, they only address part of the problem ... Even with the most powerful servers in SoftLayer's fleet, your page can load at a crawl if your code can't be rendered quickly by a browser.

That makes life as a website developer difficult. The process of optimizing code and tweaking settings to speed up load times can be time-consuming and frustrating. Or as Chip explained to me, "Speeding up your site is essential, it shouldn’t be be slow and complicated. We fix that problem." Take a look:

The idea that your site performance can be sped up significantly overnight seems a little crazy, but if it works (which it clearly does), wouldn't it be crazier not to try it? SPEEDILICIOUS offers a $1 trial for you to see the results on your own site, and they regularly host a free webinar called "How to Grow Your Business 5-15% Overnight" which covers the critical techniques for speeding up any website.

As technology continues to improve and behavioral patterns of purchasing migrate away from the mall and onto our computers and smart phones, SPEEDILICIOUS has a tremendous opportunity to capture a ripe market. So they're clearly a great fit for Catalyst. If you're interested in learning more or would like to speak to Seymour, Chip or anyone on their team, please let me know and I'll make the direct introduction any time.

This guest blog features Fruition, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Fruition's SEO and SEM reporting web app provides highly accurate reports on search engine rankings and onsite signals that impact your Google and Bing rankings. In the video below, learn a little more about Fruition (and a few key SEO/SEM tips for small businesses) from Fruition's Brad Anderson, and scroll down to read about SEO Goals and Key Indicators.

SEO Goals and Key Indicators

Google's Feb 2012 Update

Between February 25-28th Google rolled out another big set of changes to their algorithm. These changes knocked down a lot of short cuts that SEO companies were using, including blog networks. The red flags have been there for a long time. Blog networks are easy to uncover simply because of the complexity of trying to setup a truly diverse hosting environment. It is not just separate C-class IP addresses it is also registrars, DNS, admin login IP addresses, plug-in profiles, etc. There are so many easy ways to group sites as being related or identical that it is not worth the effort of trying to take short cuts with your linking. Instead focus on what is going to have a lasting impact on your SEO:

Page Speed – Improve your code, increase your hardware, etc.

Better Onsite Content

Usability

These three factors will have a lasting impact on your SEO during 2012 and beyond.

Get Your Strategy Together

Successful internet marketing campaigns have one thing in common: Comprehensive strategies. Today's marketplace makes it extremely difficult to compete in one area of internet marketing without complimenting that work in several other areas. For example, why invest in search engine optimization if you don't have a quality website to convert the traffic to leads or sales? Why invest in a mobile app if you aren't going to optimize the listing to generate a high volume of downloads? These examples show how a comprehensive strategy to internet marketing is the best approach for future success.

Fruition.net has been successful in this comprehensive approach by staying at the forefront of each individual strategy. At the core of these strategies is a collection of goals and key indicators we use to monitor, adjust, and track performance. Below you will find a few of the most important goals for each area of internet marketing.

Comprehensive Internet Marketing Strategies

Search Engine OptimizationSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website with the end goal of improving your ranking on the major search engines. Here are the goals and key indicators you should be tracking to evaluate the success of your SEO campaign:

Keyword Rankings — This one is easy! Determine which keywords you think will generate more business, write them down, and track your rankings for each of them every month. Side note: Make sure you aren't logged in to your Google account in order to receive unbiased results.

Non-Branded Search Traffic — This is the traffic that has come to your website via the search engines, but the visitor did not use your brand name in their search. Your website should already be capturing the branded searches, so the real test is how much non-branded traffic your website is generating and increasing each month.

Conversions — This is where the rubber meets the road. Increases in rankings and traffic are great, but ultimately these campaigns are all about generating new leads or revenue. We track phone calls, email inquiries, and revenue numbers for our clients to give them instant feedback on their marketing investment. Some clients take it a step further and track the leads via a CRM to produce a tangible return on investment.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a quick method of generating an increase of traffic to your website. You are literally paying for each click, but watch out because your budget can quickly get away from you if you don't know what you are doing. Here are the metrics you should be following to ensure a quality PPC campaign:

Quality Score — When someone clicks on your PPC ad, you can direct them to any page on your website. It might be the home page or a specific landing page, but whichever page is chosen will be given a Quality Score (scale 1-10) by Google. This quality score measures the relevancy of the page as it relates to the PPC ad. The lower the relevancy, the higher the cost per click. Therefore, you want to make your landing page as relevant as possible and don't advertise unless your landing page Quality Score is 5 or higher.

Cost Per Conversion — This should be your #1 key indicator for tracking purposes. The cost per conversion measures the total cost it takes to generate a lead or sale. The beauty of this key indicator is that it encapsulates all of the moving parts of a paid search campaign: ad design, ad bidding, quality score, landing page design, landing page quality, landing page calls to action, etc.

Social Media
Social media has been a big buzz word for the past couple of years and for good reason. People are spending A LOT of time on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the like. If you are going to compete online, then you need to at least have a presence with the major channels. Here are a couple ways to measure your effectiveness:

Likes/Fans — This is an easy one to track. How many people like your business on Facebook or are following you on Twitter? The larger the number, the better. Search engines like to see a large following because they feel it represents authority and a leader of the industry.

Shares/Retweets — There are free tools available that can provide you with the number of times your content has been shared or retweeted. Another case of bigger is better because it shows the people who are following you are engaged with your content.

Google +1 — So far we have not seen a correlation between getting +1s and higher organic rankings. That has to change or it seems +1 will be considered a failure.

Website and Application Development
Building a new website or mobile application is a very detail oriented project that requires a well defined process. The best way to track the success of your campaign is make sure your process is well documented with dates attached to each of your deliverables of the project. The time spent up front in the planning stages will bring clarity to the project for all involved and help the project stay on task. Below is a platform that can be built into a very detailed list of deliverables for a development project:

Internet marketing is a rapidly changing marketplace. Employing several complimentary strategies and monitoring the performance will provide you with the greatest opportunity for success. Good luck in 2012 and may all of your internet marketing strategies come to Fruition!

This guest blog series highlights companies in SoftLayer's Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we're excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.